Statesman > XL Blogs > Archives > 2005 > April > 21
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Lunch down under
Went to lunch at Aussie’s Volleybar and Grill today and and to quote Holly Golightly, “I must say, the mind reels.”
Who are these people who can play endless rounds of volleyball during the day? Don’t they have to go to work? Don’t they have to, oh I don’t know, let me just pull an example randomly out of the air, stand screaming and crying at a fax machine begging for it to release one please-God-I-mean-it-just-ONE fax confirmation without turning said confirmation into a hopelessly bedraggled waffle fry?
Just me then? Right.
Anyway, outside my booth at Aussie’s the laddies who lunge were heaving themselves all over the sandlot, setting and spiking and developing all manner of abdominal muscles rarely found outside Michelangelo ceiling treatments. I found the whole thing extremely off-putting. How is a girl supposed to eat, much less enjoy her grilled chicken salad the way the good Lord intended it (thoroughly smothered with bleu cheese dressing and nifty little almond slivers, in accordance with the Scriptures) if she is reminded with every volley and serve that her own nascent abdominal muscles are tucked away for safe keeping under a nice protective layer of padding (entirely unrelated to the almonds and dressing, of course) and that she really ought not be at Aussies but sneaking in a lunchtime workout instead?
She moves seats, that’s how.
Permalink | | Categories: By Rhiannon Gammill
No more reach-around
The space between my living room wall and the big TV is a space where I no longer have to go, and my wife and I consider this a Very Good Thing.
There are cables and adapters and more cables coming out of the wall for future speakers as yet only imagined. S-Videos co-mingle, as if in a very cool rap video, with component cables, coaxial cables, speaker wire and the odd game console controller wire. They all just kind of writhe down there on the floor, all dusty and akimbo, transmitting their data this way and that, and I’ll stop there because it’s already reminding me all too much of the dance scene from “Matrix: Reloaded.”
At least two or three times a week, I used to have to run back there to switch out component video cables that plug into the back of the TV. Component cables are the Red/Green/Blue connectors you find on DVD players, newer TV sets, HDTV set-top boxes and the higher-end cables available for PlayStation2, Xbox and GameCube systems (the only way you can play HDTV-resolution games with the current crop of game systems). I’ve got two component video connections on the TV. And five sets of component video cables.
We might finish watching a DVD, then want to fire up the GameCube, but, oops, the TiVo is already plugged in to the other port, so … it’s time to get back there, in that little crawl space, to swap out wires.
Auto-switchers for component cables exist, and some of the nicer ones even have connections for digital audio.
I got lucky and picked up a Mad Catz component video switcher for under $20 at the local video game emporium. True, it’s not as elegant a solution as an auto-switcher, with selects which feed you’re mostly likely to use and switches between the video and audio automatically based on the priority you set, but I like that the bulb looks like a detonator you might set on an alien fortress and that I only have to crouch next to the TV in the audio shelf to switch between components instead of making the dangerous journey behind the TV, which only the family kittens seem to really enjoy.
Permalink | | Categories: By Omar Gallaga
Southern-fried insecticide
The other day one of my neighbors put up a bug zapper in the front yard. Not hooked to a modest metal post or anything tasteful like that, but dangling from high in an oak tree like a beacon in the night for all things buggy.
A string tied to the zapper loops over an oak branch and is secured to the roof. No such forethought went into the power supply — the long orange extension cord hangs to the ground and snakes through the yard.
You’ll get no indignant complaints from me (at least not while my front yard is still stuck in the muddy stage of shrub removal and grass planting), bug zappers are an integral part of Southern culture.
I won’t go so far as the mom-and-pop diner I once visited in Deep East Texas that actually had a bug zapper inside the restaurant, but I do own one myself.
My friend Bret (the feller with the rule that one should always patronize the nearest bar) gave me one as a wedding gift, along with two lawn chairs and a 12-pack of beer.
He called it a “redneck entertainment center.”
And on a good summer night — I’m not ashamed to admit — it beats the heck out of TV.
Permalink | | Categories: By Dave Thomas
Crib notes
When JC Penney launched its MTV Cribs line of home furnishings, there was one thing that totally surprised me.
No “Scarface.”
If you’ve seen “Cribs” even once, you know that cribs-dwellers love their “Scarface.” A fortune could have been made selling them “Scarface” potholders, “Scarface” shower curtains, “Scarface” decorative candles, “Scarface” baby furniture. Penney’s, you messed up.
The folks at VU Games are smarter. They’re launching “Scarface: The Game” next fall. Right now, at the swankest of cribs, crews are no doubt adding on “Scarface”-playing rooms. Because you can’t play “Scarface” in the same ol’ room where you play the rest of your games. It just isn’t done.
What we need, friends, is to figure out our own “Scarface” product line. Fashion? Themed weddings? Themed funerals? What do you think?
Permalink | | Categories: By Sarah Lindner
